Latest news

Law firm managers and in-house counsel will increasingly rely on artificial intelligence for decisions on the best strategic course to take in the future, according to a Law Society study.

Studying law at the London School of Economics and Oxford University are the best for men and women respectively in terms of their career earnings, ground-breaking new research has found.

Evidence provided to MPs by those involved in or observing the courts have outlined wide-ranging concerns about the government’s court modernisation programme.

Top-25 practice DWF is considering whether to become by far the largest law firm to list on the London Stock Exchange, it emerged today. The move would galvanise interest in law firms going public.

The Court of Appeal has overturned a ruling that leading Welsh firm Hugh James did not have to pay a former client damages even though it had provided negligent advice. It is the latest in a long line of negligence cases to come out of the government’s miners’ compensation scheme.

Pioneering alternative business structure Riverview Law has launched a recruitment scheme for lawyers who want to retrain to handle commercial contract work. The first cohort of its ‘Legal Re-Train’ programme has taken in 10 solicitors from family law, personal injury, litigation, industrial disease and employment for a two-year training programme.

A leading claims management company fined £533,000 for multiple rule breaches – including its sales agents calling banks pretending to be customers – has lost an appeal against the sanction. The tribunal heard the call of an employee telling his grandmother that the CMC had changed its working practices for a regulatory audit.

Law firms will have to publish their prices for a range of consumer and business services, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has decided, but they will not have to put their complaints records in the public domain. It comes alongside research showing consumers particularly wanted information on price and quality before choosing a lawyer.

Ethical, moral and legal risks from the growing use of algorithms are under the spotlight as the Law Society launches a public policy commission today on the impact of new technology on the justice system. One of the commissioners, said she was particularly concerned by the use of algorithms in the sensitive areas of divorce and employment law.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has tempered its proposal to allow solicitors to set up their own law firms as soon as they qualify, as it unveiled the final wave of changes to its Handbook. This completes the two-year process of rewriting the handbook, which is set to be around 130 pages in total, more than 300 pages less than now.